How To Install Firefox On Debian Jessie.
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Iceweasel is great, but I prefer Firefox.
A while back I decided to go back to my favorite linux distribution, Debian.
The current stable release of Debian is code named Jessie, and this is what
I have installed on my laptop at the time of writing this post.
Mozilla has three famous desktop applications. Those applications are Firefox,
Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. But Debian has been shipping those products
re-branded as Iceweasel, Icdeodove, and Iceape, respectively. Debian
does this as a workaround for some incompatibilities between the Debian Free
Software Guidelines and Mozilla’s trademark usage policy, and I think something
related to the Mozilla logos licensing as well. I am not aware of the details of
the conflicts, and I would like to read about it some other time.
For now, I wanted to install Firefox instead of, or alongside, Iceweasel on my
laptop. Iceweasel is great, but I was having a few problems. One example would
be the different User Agent information, which causes some problems while using
services on the internet, like Medium. Medium does not recognize my browser to be
supported, and thus disables the option of writing stories if I am browsing it
using Iceweasel.
I did a quick Google search on how to install Firefox on Debian Jessie,
and a majority of the results suggested adding repositories from Ubuntu
packages hosted on Sourceforge. I had two major problems with that:
Problem 1: I don’t like Sourceforge. At all. For various reasons, but that’s
a story for another time.
Problem 2: I don’t like the idea of adding the repositories of another
distro to my current setup. Does not seem like a neat solution.
So I kept searching until I found this “Debian Mozilla team” page. I
knew I found my desired solution.
Below are the steps I followed from that page to get Firefox installed on
Debian Jessie.
Step 1: Add Mozilla Archive to APT Repositories
Open a terminal as root, and add a new file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
directory:
touch /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-mozilla.list
Open the file using your favorite text editor, mine happens to be vim, and add
the following line to it:
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ jessie-backports firefox-release
Step 2: Add the Mozilla Archive Key
This line adds mozilla.debian.net archive to your list of archives. Since the
packages at mozilla.debian.net are signed, running apt-get update now will
spit out a key not found error. To add the key you need to download the
pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring
package, and install it. The package requires that debian-keying package be
installed.
cd ~/
wget mozilla.debian.net/pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring_1.1_all.deb
dpkg -i pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring_1.1_all.deb
Step 3: Install Firefox
Now it is time to update the archives and install Firefox:
apt-get update
apt-get install -t jessie-backports firefox
And now you have Firefox installed.
Note that Iceweasel is also still installed, and they both will use the same
settings and configurations. When I started Firefox, it had all the add-ons and
settings and even the tabs that were opened in Iceweasel, all preserved.
Check the mozilla.debian.net page for various
combinations of Debian release, Mozilla desktop application you want to
install, and the version of the Mozilla desktop application you want
installed.
Iceweasel is great, but I prefer Firefox.
A while back I decided to go back to my favorite linux distribution, Debian. The current stable release of Debian is code named Jessie, and this is what I have installed on my laptop at the time of writing this post.
Mozilla has three famous desktop applications. Those applications are Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. But Debian has been shipping those products re-branded as Iceweasel, Icdeodove, and Iceape, respectively. Debian does this as a workaround for some incompatibilities between the Debian Free Software Guidelines and Mozilla’s trademark usage policy, and I think something related to the Mozilla logos licensing as well. I am not aware of the details of the conflicts, and I would like to read about it some other time.
For now, I wanted to install Firefox instead of, or alongside, Iceweasel on my laptop. Iceweasel is great, but I was having a few problems. One example would be the different User Agent information, which causes some problems while using services on the internet, like Medium. Medium does not recognize my browser to be supported, and thus disables the option of writing stories if I am browsing it using Iceweasel.
I did a quick Google search on how to install Firefox on Debian Jessie, and a majority of the results suggested adding repositories from Ubuntu packages hosted on Sourceforge. I had two major problems with that:
Problem 1: I don’t like Sourceforge. At all. For various reasons, but that’s a story for another time.
Problem 2: I don’t like the idea of adding the repositories of another distro to my current setup. Does not seem like a neat solution.
So I kept searching until I found this “Debian Mozilla team” page. I knew I found my desired solution.
Below are the steps I followed from that page to get Firefox installed on Debian Jessie.
Step 1: Add Mozilla Archive to APT Repositories
Open a terminal as root, and add a new file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
directory:
touch /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-mozilla.list
Open the file using your favorite text editor, mine happens to be vim, and add the following line to it:
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ jessie-backports firefox-release
Step 2: Add the Mozilla Archive Key
This line adds mozilla.debian.net archive to your list of archives. Since the
packages at mozilla.debian.net are signed, running apt-get update now will
spit out a key not found error. To add the key you need to download the
pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring
package, and install it. The package requires that debian-keying package be
installed.
cd ~/
wget mozilla.debian.net/pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring_1.1_all.deb
dpkg -i pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring_1.1_all.deb
Step 3: Install Firefox
Now it is time to update the archives and install Firefox:
apt-get update
apt-get install -t jessie-backports firefox
And now you have Firefox installed.
Note that Iceweasel is also still installed, and they both will use the same settings and configurations. When I started Firefox, it had all the add-ons and settings and even the tabs that were opened in Iceweasel, all preserved.
Check the mozilla.debian.net page for various combinations of Debian release, Mozilla desktop application you want to install, and the version of the Mozilla desktop application you want installed.